Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale

one of the hardest things in this game is figuring out how to exploit the price matching ai, and staying afloat every week when the payment is due. this is because they keep the most important knowledge in the game away from you - your relationship between the customers, and how much they're willing/able to spend. if there was some 'character level' stat in the ui that told you what level they were at, and what their budget was, then you would always know what they could buy and how much they would pay. but this would be too easy?

probably because devs looked at this info and thought, wow even kids would be able to figure it out if we told them how it worked, and also it makes your role as a merchant feel way more realistic that you would have to memorise the habits of your customers. so we're going to reduce this note to a little heart flashing on the screen (that's how you know their budgets have increased and you can start selling them more expensive items).

then how to make a reliable profit? there are really only 2 things you need to know:

- ALL customers will pay at least 249% (no this is not a typo) of the cost for any items that are in high demand, on top of what they would normally spend. though staying below 250% guarantees a combo, besides the woman/girl that sometimes rarely haggles no matter what.

- their budgets are ignored for any items they get off the shelves, which means they can pay any reasonable price no matter what level they're at.

now do what you will with this information :D.

hints: start off with a bit of dungeon crawling to get some seed money, then go shopping every morning when both market and guild are open, to take advantage of daily booms and busts. buy up any red items you can to gouge your loyal customers, and if too much of your stock is in low demand (blue items that customers will not pay full price for), get a vending machine. they will fetch the original cost for any items in low demand, but give no xp, so they can also be used to buy up items on discount to sell at full price.

wow what is it with you and vending machines man... this is about playing the early game, not sitting around waiting for lucky sales at 50-100k a pop, when your merchant level is high enough to exploit endless amounts of high level items. also people are usually going to want to do other stuff in the meantime. clearly you're still confused about how you even got there and probably bored silly with this terrible endgame.